Tag Archives: critique group

Technique, Publishing

Critique partners vs. editors

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So earlier this month, we talked about what a difference critique partners make. And they do—mine routinely suggest the exact thing I needed to fix a plot line, a story arc, a scene, a character. They are truly amazing.

But even amazing critique groups are probably not acquisitions editors. They may not think like acquisitions editors. As Alicia Rasley has blogged before, sometimes your editor hates what your CPs love, for myriad reasons. It seems sad and counterproductive to think that a book you’ve spent six or twelve months with in critique group may now spent that long in editing because it fundamentally doesn’t work.

Part of that, as Alicia mentions, is the protracted reading your critique partners must do. In a standard critique group format, the group reads a scene or a chapter at a time (or perhaps isolated scenes), while an editor is trying to whip a whole book into shape, hammering out those overarching problems of plot or arc or character that a critique group who reads the book in a drip at a time just can’t see.

But there’s another issue at work, too. In many groups, critique partners’ job is to work with what you’ve got. It’s hard to suggest overarching changes without a high-level vision of the novel, so they do what they can: work on polishing the prose you present. You have to really develop trust in addition to fiction-vision to suggest (and take) the major changes that will make your story deeper, more engaging, more complex (in a good way), more coherent, more resonant.

But those changes are an editor’s job, her wheelhouse. She works not to be your friend but to make your book everything it can be. Her job is to knock it down and make it better.

Your critique partners may be right: your book may be great. Or they may be biased (by incomplete information or lovin ya, goshdarnit). The point isn’t that they’re wrong, but that it’s often beyond their purview—or perhaps beyond what you want them to do—to spot and fix the large-scale problems that an editor will home in on. Your editor’s job isn’t just to be right: it’s to make your book absolutely all that it can be. For the best book possible, use both!

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Writing Life

Becoming a better writer: find a critique group

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I know, it’s easier said than done, but truly, one of the best things you can do to improve your writing is to create or join a critique group. Having a network of writing friends helps to keep you sane, but more than that, a good critique group gives you hands-on help that no writing conference or craft book can touch.

Finding critique partners

This is truly the hard part. There are often critique partner matches going on ad hoc in the comments of popular blog posts, but you can also look to the forums of sites like Absolute Write and (I believe) CPseek.

Writers conferences can be another great place to meet potential critique partners. My critique group formed at a (kinda awkward) writers’ meeting. Another plus: we live close enough to meet in-person!

Poet and photographe, version toile

Finding GOOD critique partners

Just finding other writers isn’t the tricky part. You critique partners don’t have to write in the same genre, but you should at least be familiar with the conventions of one another’s genres. More than that, however, effective critique partners understand the mechanics of storytelling, characterization, and good writing. It can be very difficult to balance widely divergent skill levels, but this can be a personal preference.

For an effective critique group, you’ll probably need three to seven or so members. More than that and it gets unwieldy; less, and you’re only getting one additional set of eyes. Also important—although this can take a little time—you have to be able to talk freely and trust one another’s feedback. Critique partners should also know how to give useful, helpful feedback without tearing you down. Even the best advice in the world isn’t helpful if it cripples your ability to write.

Scheduling

At the officeFor a longstanding critique group, as Josi S. Kilpack says, a set meeting schedule really helps to keep your group from petering out, especially if your group is online only. My critique group usually meets in-person twice a month, but during busy times we’ve met via Skype or just sent feedback in Word docs.

Format

Typically, a critique group has each member submit one chapter per meeting, then all chapters are read and discussed in a roundtable manner. But that’s not the only workable format for a critique group.

In my critique group, for example, we have one person submit their entire novel, a quarter at a time. We typically look at higher level problems of plot, pacing, character arc and characterization. It’s hard to dig too deep into word-level issues, but more than that, when we read the novel this quickly and in these large chunks, we’re able to see these high-level gaps more easily than if we’d read the first chapter six months ago, with six others’ chapters.

When is my book ready for a critique group?

This may also depend on how your critique group works. Some people use critique groups for a final polish, others bring rough ideas or outlines to work on the basic direction of the story.

I use my critique group as my first or second round of readers. If they’re my second round, my first round gets my book as soon as I’ve smoothed out the gaps I left in the first draft, just to see if the story works overall. Then my critique group breaks it down by quarters, focusing more on the storytelling particulars.

Another plus of this: because some of the changes we have to make are large, no one has wasted too much time nitpicking text that might change or be cut altogether.

After I go back through and make the changes from critique notes and work on the copy editing, if I’ve made big changes, my group will (kindly) take another look, either before or after a round of beta readers. Then it goes off to my editor!

What do you think? How does your critique group work? How did you find your critique partners?

Photo credits: Poet and photographe, version toile—Julie Kertesz; At the office—C/N N/G

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Technique

A critique system that works

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For the last year, I’ve been in my first-ever in-person critique group. Julie Coulter Bellon, Emily Gray Clawson and I started off with a fairly typical arrangement for critique groups: meeting a couple times of month, exchange one or two short chapters for each meeting, read and critique those chapters for one another in advance, then read them aloud and share notes at the meeting.

Until two of the three of us didn’t really *have* a next chapter. I’d just been reading about Kristen Lamb’s concept critique, which dovetailed really well with something I’ve long worried about with the traditional critique group format.

You see, if you meet twice a month and do one or two chapters at each meeting, it will take at the bare minimum six months to read an entire manuscript—if your book isn’t overly long and you’re going as fast as the critique group can accommodate you. If you only do one chapter at each of your bimonthly meetings, it could take you over a year to get through a single novel.

My impatience to get working on the next draft notwithstanding, it’s very difficult to critique a novel as a cohesive whole in this method. After more than a year, do you remember the opening chapters very well? How can you be sure the author has fulfilled the promise of the opening and the premise s/he began with? How can we judge the pacing when we read without any pace? How can we make sure the character arcs and story structure are working? How easy is it to to follow an author down a tangent rabbit hole reading a novel one chapter every fortnight?

While I do like having line edits from my critique partners, I’m unconvinced that’s the best use of all of our time. After all, a beautifully written story can still be fatally flawed and ultimately fall flat for readers—and traditional critique groups may be powerless to prevent that.

So sitting in our fourth or so meeting, facing the possibility that our brand new group might fizzle and die for lack of material (seriously?!), I ventured a radical idea.

Radically rethinking the critique group

One of us had a manuscript completed and ready to go. So, I said, what if we worked only on her book? She’d submit many more chapters for our next meeting—we ended up doing about a quarter of the book at a time. Within two months, we’d finished her entire novel, and then the next person was ready.

But it wasn’t just the time factor. We were so much better able to comment on how the characters grew and changed, how well the climax fit the story, how the pacing and structure worked, and more. And we still got the line edits in (virtually all the time).

Naturally, this method won’t work for every writer, reader or group. Our group is small enough that we can easily get a couple novels in each year.

And now for something slightly different

We’ve been working that way since last March, but last night we decided to Julie suggested we change things up a little. Normally we’d still tried to read all our chapters aloud. But when those chapters amounted to practically a novella in and of themselves, our meetings ran into the wee hours of the morning (with an hour commute afterwards!).

We first tried our newer method in december out of necessity. Our socializing was taking up more and more of our meeting time—no complaints!—we had a whole bunch of chapters to finish, and . . . I pretty much totally screwed up the characterization and motivation through the whole section.

So rather than reading the chapters, we focused on the notes—not the line edits, which we’d all carefully noted, but the bigger issues plaguing those pages. It was the best, most helpful critique group session I’ve ever had. (And also the worst, but that was because my pages were apparently the weakest I’ve ever shown anyone.)

So last night, we took the same tack, focusing on our big-picture notes: the exact things that would be so much harder to do if we’d only tackled a chapter at a time.

Yes, there are advantages to reading your work aloud (and disadvantages), and having someone else read it for us, but we can still read aloud at home. In fact, ideally, I do that before I even send the chapters out. Really helps to catch long sentences.

I really love our critique system. It’s different, but it really works for us. Just see what Julie and Emily have to say about it!

What do you think? How does your critique group work? Have you ever tried an “unusual” critique group format? Come join the conversation!

Photo credits: I think I do… [Do you need to edit your friends?]—eltpics; Editor’s note—juicyrai

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Technique

When to take critiques

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Obviously, nobody else knows our story and our characters like we, the authors, do. While critique partners are absolutely invaluable in telling whether a scene or even the whole plot works, they don’t have to be the be-all and end-all when it comes to determining what, exactly, goes into your story. As I said yesterday, immediately changing your work based on one person’s opinion is a knee-jerk reaction means you’re writing to an audience of one.

This is exactly why we need more than one critique partner. In fact, it’s why we need even that first critique partner. When one person has read your story (i.e. you), you have the feedback from one person. When you get feedback from one other person (who, let’s face it, may be just as blind as we are when it comes to storytelling, craft, publishing or what have you), now you have two people’s opinions. What if there’s a tie? What if one of you is dead wrong and cannot see it? What if you both missed something?

We need several pairs of eyes to look over our work, to catch our mistakes, to offer different points of view, to get as broad a range of opinions before we start trying to get our books out there and published. (Oy—do you know what it feels like to get feedback in a rejection that you’ve already gotten from a critique partner?)

Take your time in getting critiques (the hard part for me!) and in applying them. Let the feedback set in for a few days, and see if your critique partners all or mostly agree on those points.

Several of Rick Daley’s rules for taking critiques hearken back to this principle:

Rule # 3: Seriously contemplate your changes. Take time. Work through it. You never microwave a roast. Slow cooking always turns out better. (NOTE: what’s with all the food references?)

Rule # 4: Look for common threads in the feedback and start there. The advice of the many outweighs the advice of the few. . .

Rule #7: Be ready to disregard any feedback that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes people will tell you to say something different, but that does not always equate to better. Some people may give ill-advised feedback. If it doesn’t make sense and if clarification [rule #6] seems unnecessary, just disregard it.

The majority doesn’t have to rule, of course—it’s still your story. You can do what you want, what you feel is right. But if some advice is truly wrong for your story (because, say, your CP hasn’t read the whole thing yet and couldn’t possibly know that person is the murderer), still look to see if there’s an underlying issue prompting this advice that needs to be resolved. Maybe that character’s behavior in this scene is too strange or leaves too big a clue.

And what if they tell you to cut your favorite part of the story?

The fact that it’s your favorite may be a bad sign in and of itself. We all have our “darlings,” and yes, some of them must be killed. Give the advice some time. Weigh it out. Contemplate how cutting or changing that element would change your story. Could you take it in new directions? Would it deepen the characters? Make the plot stronger? Or just plain be more interesting?

I’ve mentioned this before, but even if we’re initially opposed to some advice, sometimes thinking it through makes a huge difference:

I should add here that fortunately I’ve been a victim of this one, too. My favorite example here is when a critique partner suggested I add a scene near the beginning of the book. I hemmed and hawed over this privately—until the scene started playing out in my mind. It was so entertaining—and just like she said, solved so many problems—that I just had to write it, just to see what it’d look like. (And when I still liked the finished product, I stuck it in there.)

And, as always, remember to thank your critique partners!

What do you think? How do you know when (and when not to) take advice from critiques?

Photo by Casey Smith

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Technique

How to take critiques

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We’ve talked about receiving bad advice before. And sometimes, recognizing bad advice is as easy as reading it, like when I received a suggestion that would kill all the tension in a story—or kill the murderer in the opening scene.

But not all advice we have an adverse reaction to is bad. Sometimes it just hurts us on an emotional level, and we react from that place instead of really listening to the ideas in the critique.

Rick Daley, who runs the Public Query Slushpile, offered this advice on receiving critiques:

Rule # 1: Don’t pout if you hear something negative. Remember that you asked for the feedback in the first place. Don’t get defensive and don’t argue.

What’s the best thing to do if the advice hurts? Do. Not. Engage. If you respond emotionally to something a critique partner said analytically, first of all, the CP’s entire frame of reference is off. This can escalate very quickly into emotional and even personal attacks—when really, your CP (probably) wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. (This assumes your CP wasn’t unnecessarily harsh or otherwise insane critique partner.)

If you find the critique painful, simply thank your critique partner and put the critique away for a while—however long it takes to take the edge off, and then some. (It might also be a good idea to take a step back from your work for a while, too, if you’re still that emotionally invested. Critique partners are only the first of many people who will respond to your work!)

Critiques can be a good way to work on developing that “thick skin” that you’ll need when you face rejection after rejection, endless rounds of editorial revisions, or harsh reviews.

Of course, just because some feedback hurts doesn’t automatically mean you should follow it. Immediately changing your work based on one person’s opinion is another knee-jerk reaction that may not be helpful either. We’ll look at how to determine whether to follow hard advice tomorrow.

What do you think? What do you do when a critique hurts?

Photo by Paul Iddon

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Technique

Writing friends

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This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Writing resources

After I’ve written an entire series on bad advice, and a fairly long guide to being completely unhelpful as a critique partner, you may think I haven’t had any good experiences with writing friends. This is not true. (Contest judges are another story.)

I actually have several people (mostly writers, but a few nonwriters) who read my writing and consistently offer excellent analysis, insight and advice. (And, oddly enough, almost none of them actually read this blog. But thank you anyway!)

Their advice has pointed out weaknesses in my writing from phrasing to pacing—and not in the “oh, you suck” way, but in a “Hey, I think you can do this better” way. They’ve helped me see issues that I knew my story had—and find solutions to make my work stronger. They’re more than just fresh eyes to give me perspective—they’ve been a wealth of ideas and insight to improve my story on so many levels.

Each of my critiquers/beta readers is good at spotting different things. Each of them has different strengths—one may be really good at helping me to deepen characterization while another is good at seeing . . . “opportunities” for more suspense. Even nonwriters—i.e. people like your target audience—can offer valuable insight (though they may not phrase it quite the same way a writer would 😉 ).

But I’m sure we all have at least one story. How have writing friends and critique partners helped your writing? (Feel free to share specific examples if you like!)

Photo by Art G.

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Technique

How to be completely unhelpful as a critique partner

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This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series bad advice

I sometimes feel like I’ve been on the receiving end of a disproportionate number (or maybe just quality) of flat-out bad critiques. In saying that, I’m not saying that I’m a better writer or smarter or prettier than these critique partners (or that I’ve never had good critique partners, because I do have several)—but I’ve come to believe it takes special talent to read, comment on and “correct” eight, eighty or eight hundred pages and do nothing to improve the story. Especially when said story is mine, and thus, far from perfect.

Don’t we all want to develop our talents?! So, with much of the following based on actual feedback (but only a couple so noted), here’s some advice on

How to be completely unhelpful as a critique partner

Deliberately try to misread or misunderstand. If there’s any possible way this writing can be misinterpreted, no matter how much of a stretch, no matter if you understood perfectly the first four times you read it, no matter what variety of garbled English you’d have to speak to understand it that way, make a big note of how lost you are.

Contradict yourself. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Or it isn’t.

Slavishly adhere to each and every rule you think you’ve ever heard or should use. Somebody once said something about never, ever, ever, ever using nouns, right?

Make an example of your critique partner. Why, just the other day, you and Completely Uninterested Party were discussing this principle. You must make DARN sure that this author knows it and knows it well after you’re through with her!

Overread. I think there really may be something more going on with this dialogue tag. “She said”? I think that must carry a lot of nuance. I don’t get it, though. Can you explain it better?

Underread. A page should take no more than 60 seconds to read and comment on. If all facts presented are not perfectly clear upon initial skim, the failing is obviously the author’s.

Take sarcastic pot shots at characters (or author). That whole too-stupid-to-live thing is so obvious it must be intentional. Maybe the writer’s equally stupid? The best way to point it out is to use “stupid” as often as possible, or whatever other word you want.

Be cruel. It’s called tough love for a reason. And who couldn’t use a thicker skin? Just wait for reviews.

Overexplain. Yeah, on all the other 25 pages the author conjugated her verbs right, but man, right here she didn’t. Let’s learn subject-verb agreement, shall we??

Highlight every instance of a mistake. There are ten sentences in the chapter where she uses “as”? Mark every single one. One author once said we can’t have anything happen simultaneously. Smiling and walking at the same time? Ridiculous! (Actual advice from a contest judge, not phrased that way.)

Assume nothing is intentional. They used the word “raven” three times in four pages? Ugh. Nobody would ever pay for such drivel. Or memorize it hundreds of years later.

Make no overall comments. She can figure out what I thought of it based on my line-by-line reactions.

Make no comments overall. Or not.

Make no comments on the text.

Make no comments in the text. And three to four sentences overall should be sufficient. For a whole manuscript. Make sure one of them was “Pretty good,” “Surprisingly competent,” or “I liked your font.”

Use your mother’s grammar rules on a deep POV passage. That character needs to go back to third grade if he says “like” instead of “as if.” (The grammar principle, not phrased this way, was advice I received in comments from a published contest judge. As. If!)

Don’t waste time thinking about your suggestions or their implications for the story. After all, what’s the writer’s job?

Don’t converse with your critique partner afterward, especially not to clarify anything you said. If they don’t get it, it’s not your problem. And if they try to contradict you under the guise of discussion? Cut all ties.

Take absolutely none of their advice on your own work. They’re coming to you for help, aren’t they? How could they possibly improve your work?

Remind them what a favor you’re doing. Make sure they’re sufficiently grateful.

Don’t give examples or explain what you mean.

Point out the obvious. It helps them see it.

Make generic comments to point out weaknesses at the end of scenes, not where the problems occur. Oh, yeah, there was a problem like two or three pages ago, but that’s just so much scrolling. I’m sure she’ll figure out where I mean.

Make sure it’s written exactly the way you’d write it. The author’s voice? Pfft. Take it upon yourself to rewrite a scene to show her how it’s done. But don’t look back at their scene–their details might contaminate your brilliance.

Take everything literally. Figurative language is for wimps.

What do you think? How else can you be a completely unhelpful critique partner?

Photo credits: sign—Eric Kilby; cats—icanhascheezburger; thumbs down—striatic

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Technique, Works

Dealing with bad advice

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This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series bad advice

When we’re first learning to write and we turn to others for feedback and guidance, we’re eager to get their help. After all, the people we turn to are knowledgeable and kind and so much better versed in the ways of publishing, right?

Right?

Well, when we’re first learning, yeah, the people we turn to will probably be more knowledgeable and their advice will help us improve our writing. And sometimes, even the good, kind things they say can be hard to hear.

But sometimes, they have no clue what they’re talking about.

Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive.

—Carolyn Wells

I think we’ve all been there: we get some piece of advice—from a crit partner, from an editor, from a total stranger—that just doesn’t work for our story.

Maybe I’m not unique, but I’ve gotten quite a bit of off-the-wall, mean-spirited or flat-out wrongheaded advice in the last few years. My favorite . . . well, it’s hard to choose, but I do have a special place in my heart for the “tip” to kill off my murderer in the opening scene. Or the one piece of advice designed to “solve” a problem (when really, the real problem with this section was the exact opposite), that instead destroyed the tension of the entire story and introduced a major continuity and factual issue. And then there was the person who consistently demanded I add details—ones that were already there, just a few lines before their comments.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

—G.K. Chesterton

I hope I don’t have to tell you I didn’t follow that advice.

So this week, we’ll talk about how to deal with all kinds of bad advice—from the ill-intentioned to the “Are we reading the same thing?” kind—and how to move past it.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

Photo credit: Rachel Sian

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